Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華) is to be aglow today with the start of the postponed Taipei Lantern Festival, with a two-story-tall dancing lantern in the form of a robot ox to take center stage at the 10-day event.
The 6m installation, which weighs about 100kg and represents the Year of the Ox in the Chinese zodiac, is the first large-scale dancing lantern to be featured at the festival, which runs until Dec. 26, Taipei Deputy Mayor Tsai Ping-kun (蔡炳坤) said yesterday.
The lantern — which has been named “New,” a homonym of niu (牛), the Chinese character for cow and ox — incorporates music, choreography, drama, technology and traditional puppetry, Tsai said.
“It can be described as a dialogue between humanities and technology, as its performance has a story,” he said. “This performance in a way represents Wanhua’s story, because out of those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Wanhua was affected the most.”
Wanhua was an epicenter of a cluster of COVID-19 infections that began in May.
The main lantern signifies new life and encourages people to start anew, Tsai said.
Festival creative director Akibo Lee (李明道) said that the lantern was the collective effort of many experts, including choreographer Wu I-fang (吳義芳), a former dancer with the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.
The festival’s Web site would have videos and livestreams of events because Taiwan’s borders are closed to international tourists, Lee said.
Previous festivals have had up to 4 million visitors, with more than 3 million last year, despite the pandemic, he said.
The 10-day festival was scheduled to run from Feb. 26 to March 7, but was delayed, as most local governments canceled or postponed their municipal lantern festivals this year due to the COVID-19 situation at the time.
Taiwan’s Liu Ming-i, right, who also goes by the name Ray Liu, poses with a Chinese Taipei flag after winning the gold medal in the men’s physique 170cm competition at the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Asian Championship in Ajman, United Arab Emirates, yesterday.
Costa Rica sent a group of intelligence officials to Taiwan for a short-term training program, the first time the Central American country has done so since the countries ended official diplomatic relations in 2007, a Costa Rican media outlet reported last week. Five officials from the Costa Rican Directorate of Intelligence and Security last month spent 23 days in Taipei undergoing a series of training sessions focused on national security, La Nacion reported on Friday, quoting unnamed sources. The Costa Rican government has not confirmed the report. The Chinese embassy in Costa Rica protested the news, saying in a statement issued the same
A year-long renovation of Taipei’s Bangka Park (艋舺公園) began yesterday, as city workers fenced off the site and cleared out belongings left by homeless residents who had been living there. Despite protests from displaced residents, a city official defended the government’s relocation efforts, saying transitional housing has been offered. The renovation of the park in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), near Longshan Temple (龍山寺), began at 9am yesterday, as about 20 homeless people packed their belongings and left after being asked to move by city personnel. Among them was a 90-year-old woman surnamed Wang (王), who last week said that she had no plans
TO BE APPEALED: The environment ministry said coal reduction goals had to be reached within two months, which was against the principle of legitimate expectation The Taipei High Administrative Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Taichung Environmental Protection Bureau in its administrative litigation against the Ministry of Environment for the rescission of a NT$18 million fine (US$609,570) imposed by the bureau on the Taichung Power Plant in 2019 for alleged excess coal power generation. The bureau in November 2019 revised what it said was a “slip of the pen” in the text of the operating permit granted to the plant — which is run by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) — in October 2017. The permit originally read: “reduce coal use by 40 percent from Jan.
RSS